“I consider the Voice Dialogue process to be one of the most powerful tools for personal growth that I’ve ever discovered.”Shakti Gawain

What is Voice Dialogue?

Voice Dialogue is a method for becoming aware of the many aspects of yourself and for connecting with the source and wisdom of your being.

It involves dialoging with and learning about the various parts of your psyche – your selves, which are also known as inner selves or energy patterns, and include archetypes.

Maybe you’re familiar with inner self work already? Some psychotherapeutic systems work with inner selves or ‘parts’, especially with the Inner Critic, Inner Child and Higher Self or Spiritual Self.

Voice Dialogue and Relationship

Voice Dialogue involves learning how our selves bond with the selves in other people, in predictable patterns. This work is a game changer in understanding and improving relationships.

 It also includes working with the energetic nature of the selves and learning to use energy more consciously in your relationships.

Voice Dialogue and Consciousness

When you do Voice Dialogue, you experience a shift in consciousness.

You change from being over-identified with your primary self (and its particular way of being in the world) to being able to access and embrace other parts of your psyche (along with their perspectives, feelings and energy).

This process leads to the ability to live more fully and richly and with more freedom and choice.

Who Created Voice Dialogue?

Voice Dialogue’s creators are Dr Hal Stone and Dr Sidra Stone. They first developed the Psychology of Selves in the early 1970s. The work is known fully as Voice Dialogue, Relationship and the Psychology of Selves (or alternatively the Psychology of the Aware Ego).

How Your Personality Works

You know how the petals of a rose are hidden before it blooms? With only a few visible on the outside? You, too, have only a few selves visible on the surface, with many more hidden underneath, all protecting your core.

The Outgoing Self

That part of yourself you feel is you, that holds your rules, values and much of your personal history, is your primary self.

This primary self developed in your childhood to protect you and enable your survival. It is who you have come to identify as. (You might call it your ego or your personality.)

This primary self does an amazing job (you’re alive!) but it is limited by its nature. By its perceptions, abilities, energy type, rules and values. And so therefore you’re limited by its nature.

The Lazy Self

Examples of Primary Selves

For instance, you might have developed a highly Responsible primary self, because that’s what worked for you in your family system. So now as an adult you are likely someone who others depend on. But you probably also find it difficult to let go, be spontaneous and have fun.

Or if you developed a strong Rational Mind as a primary self, then you may find it challenging to express and understand feelings (your own and other people’s).

Or if you became a Pleaser, then you probably find it impossible to feel entitled to take for yourself and have your own needs met.

The Perfectionist

Disowned Selves

Some selves you accept and include in the package that’s ‘you’ – they are your primary selves.

Other selves and energies are relegated to your shadow where you judge them or have little or no awareness of them. Those are your disowned selves.

How your selves – both primary and disowned – are ‘configured’ in you will determine how you think, feel and act. 

Freedom and Choice

Each self holds particular memories and has a narrative about your life, based on its experience of it. Each self has preferences for how you lead your life. Each self also has anxieties and concerns. 

So when you make choices, what you decide depends on who in you is involved.

This has massive implications for how your life and relationships play out.

If you’d like to have more choice in how you experience life, then becoming aware of and integrating your selves is key. 

The Spiritual Self

Free Introduction to How You Can Use Voice Dialogue in Your Life

Download my FREE ebook Which Inner Self is Running Your Life? for an example of how you can use Voice Dialogue to help you in an everyday situation.

It also gives you an overview of 20 selves, and a simple exercise to discover your own primary and disowned selves.